"Are creeps, and their defining quality—creepiness—to our age what anxiety was to postwar life?"

"The proposition is embarrassing, but, then, so is everything the pruney fingers of creepiness touch. Half a century ago, there were squares and libertines, stalwarts and histrionics, private lives and public personalities. Today, in our self-scrutinizing, liberated time, these categories have got scrambled, and distinguishing between a charmingly revealing Instagram post and a bomb of oversharing requires daunting feats of judgment. Looming behind many missteps is the threat of creepiness: a fear that, out of all the free paths open to the modern social actor, you have picked the one that is invasive, obviously needy, and perverse...."

From "The Age of Creepiness" (in The New Yorker).